Eva Schloss talks movingly about surviving Auschwitz, the constant presence of
her stepsister’s ghost – and why she knows Anne Frank would have loved
Justin Bieber

Auschwitz endowed Eva Schloss with an abiding sense of proportion. The stepsister of Anne Frank greets with bemusement the latest outbreak of synthetic outrage on the internet, this time over a comment made by the singer and teen idol Justin Bieber in the guest book of the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam.

Following his visit to the museum, created from the house in which Anne hid from the Nazis, Bieber dared to express the hope that in another life the young diarist might have been one of his fans. A clumsy comment, perhaps, but hardly the end of the world – and Eva Schloss understands more than most what the end of the world feels like.

“It’s so childish,” she says, sitting in her home in London’s Maida Vale. “She probably would have been a fan. Why not? He’s a young man and she was a young girl, and she liked film stars and music. They make a lot of fuss about everything that is connected with Anne Frank.”

The ghost of Anne has accompanied Eva throughout her life. The two were not stepsisters in life, not even particularly close friends during their time together as German-Jewish refugees in pre-war Amsterdam, but 68 years after her death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, Anne Frank continues to exert a powerful and not always welcome hold over Eva Schloss. That influence, positive and negative, is described in Eva’s newly published autobiography, After Auschwitz.

The pair’s association stems from the marriage of Anne’s father, Otto, to Eva’s mother, Fritzi, in 1953. Otto had lost his wife and two daughters in the Holocaust, while Fritzi had lost her husband and son. Each was a source of solace to the other.

“We both have suffered so much,” Fritzi once explained to Eva, “and we understand each other perfectly.”

Otto was determined to immortalise Anne’s memory through the medium of her diary, and promoting it became the governing preoccupation of his life. Eva, 83, who for 40 years refused even to speak of the horrors she had endured during the Second World War, was often marginalised as her mother joined her stepfather on promotional tours and in his battles to protect Anne’s legacy.

“It was a wonderful marriage. My mother and Otto loved each other dearly,” says Eva. “Otto would talk continuously about Anne, and I got to know her. It was his obsession, the reason for existence. If a father loses a child that is the worst thing, and it gave him a task: to convey Anne’s message to the world.

“But it was a burden. My three daughters, they wanted a grandfather, and whatever they did it was always 'Anne would have done it this way’ – and you know, they didn’t know Anne, so there was always this ghost living with us, like a shadow.

“I loved my mother – we had a wonderful relationship – but it soured my feeling a little bit. Once, my mother and Otto were in Denmark, and I had a miscarriage. My husband was in Israel and I had the three kids all on my own. I telephoned my mother to come, I was in hospital, and she said, 'Well, we have still got three days here in Denmark and then I will come’. I was very upset about that. I needed her, and she opted to stay with Otto to do the Anne Frank business.”

Eva Schloss was born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in May 1929, the second child, after her brother Heinz, of Erich and Fritzi Geiringer, her “Pappy” and “Mutti”. Following the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the family fled to the Netherlands. The Franks, who came from Frankfurt, had already arrived in Holland, setting up home in Amsterdam.

The Anne Frank Eva knew was always surrounded by friends attracted by her stories and witty observations, often related over ice cream sundaes.

“We used to play together, skipping and sitting on the steps together by our apartments,” remembers Eva. “Anne was very lively but I was more shy. I was good in sports but she was more intellectually developed, quite interested in clothes and boys.”

On May 10 1940, the relative calm enjoyed by the Geiringers and Franks ended abruptly with the sound of air-raid sirens. In just one week, German forces overwhelmed the Netherlands and the two families again found themselves living under the Nazi yoke. Life did not change immediately – the girls saw each other regularly until July 1942 – but as the persecution of Holland’s Jewish community intensified, both families took the decision to disappear.

“When my father said that we were going to go into hiding, I was like, 'Hiding – what do you mean, hiding?’ I was an outdoors child and it was a shock. No one would take a family of four, so we had to split up. 'You will go with your mother and your brother will go with me,’ said my father. I said: 'No, I want to stay together.’

“It was very difficult. I was cooped up day-in-day-out with my mother. We got on very well but nevertheless – what can you talk about when nothing is happening? We thought: 'England is powerful, America is in the war now, and it can’t last long. It will be over by Christmas 1942, or maybe a month after that. You live day by day, week by week.”

Refuge followed refuge, long periods of boredom interspersed with the terror of a sudden raid. On one occasion, Eva and her mother were saved by a secret compartment completed in the bathroom of a safe house only two hours before a raid. But luck is a finite commodity, and it duly ran out on Eva’s 15th birthday. She and her mother were betrayed by the Dutch nurse who had taken them in. A Gestapo agent, she received a mere four-year prison sentence for collaboration after the war. Erich and Heinz were betrayed by other members of the same Nazi spy ring, and the family was reunited on a train heading for Auschwitz.

“We thought: 'That’s it’,” remembers Eva. “We knew about the gassing by then through the BBC.”

Again, mother and daughter were parted from father and son. At 15, she was about to learn a lot about human nature. She was tattooed with a number on her left arm just below the elbow: A-5222. The next day it was changed to A-5272, the seven being placed above the offending two. It is still there, faint but legible, a living reminder.

“People were really for themselves,” says Eva. “There was very little compassion – you didn’t have the time or strength. You had to use all your energy for staying alive. I ate carrot ends from the rubbish heap for extra vitamins. Sometimes I wonder: how could we survive like this? We were like skeletons.”

To starvation was added brutality.

“The female guards were actually more cruel than the men. They beat you more, they screamed at you more, they made you suffer more. The men were more sarcastic. Men never beat me, but women did.”

Eva would never see Heinz again but she met her father on a few precious occasions. The final meeting lingers in her mind.

“It was very emotional; it gave me hope,” she says. “I thought my mother had been selected (for gassing). It was winter and I had frostbite on my feet. I was at a very low point, starving. My father came and I told him that my mother had died. I felt very bad about that. I think sometimes that if he had known she was alive, he would not have died. He gave up.”

Eva moved to London after the war and met her husband, Zvi Schloss, another Jewish refugee from Germany who had escaped to Palestine before the war. The marriage produced three daughters, Caroline, Jacqueline and Sylvia. Eva imagined that she had returned to normality but her girls knew all was not well.

“My youngest daughter said: 'You weren’t always mentally there for us.’ I was still having dreams and thinking about things.”

She was strict, insisting that her children eat up and go to school even when they were suffering with colds. When they came to her in the night, she insisted they return to their beds.

“I certainly did not spoil them and I think they resented that,” she says. “Someone once called me a hard-faced cow. Perhaps they were right; perhaps I have not enough sympathy for smaller suffering.”

She hopes that her book will help her daughters to understand, and forgive.

“It was really too painful but now I think we will have a better understanding. We will be able to talk more openly about why I could not be a normal mother.”